Anyone … and I mean anyone … that is sniffling about this being an “American atrocity” is a moral cretin.
They don’t want to know history, they just want to judge it by their own, contemporary politics which they hold as their god.
My dad enlisted at age 17 in 1946, Army 11th Airborne paratrooper. Because of the A-bomb, he spent ’46-’48 with the occupation Army instead of possibly dead, along with millions of Americans and Japanese who would have died during a prolonged invasion of Japan.
Fuck the people who refuse to understand that.
My dad was the middle of his billet as a training officer at Jacksonville NAS. Had the war not ended he would have gone back to a squadron in the Pacific in April of 1946 just in time for the invasion. He was very happy the war ended with the A-bomb.
“. . . .in the middle of his . . .”
Damn creeping senility.
Harold Furchtgott-Roth, Forbes: Obama Cannot Alter Non-Proliferation Treaty By Executive Order
He can (and does) lawlessly disobey and violate it, however.
Bill Whittle’s best.
[…] … and I mean anyone … that is sniffling about this being an “American atrocity” is a moral cretin. […]
My father had first landed at Normandy on D-day and fought in France then was packed up and shipped across the Atlantic, the US, and the Pacific, to invade Okinawa. He was then waiting to be part of the force to invade the Japanese home islands. My wife’s father was a young submariner in the Pacific. Neither expected to live through the coming invasion. Truman’s decision saved their, and countless others, lives. And made ours possible.
stop hey what’s that sound everybody look what’s going down
Greetings:
The TV coverage I saw, mostly Euro channels (France24, BBC, DW), showed once again that the Nanking and Manila Grannies all missed their flights and the subsequent ceremonies. My impression was that some of the moral superiority steam has gone out of those coverages. I guess 70 odd (and boy were they odd) years of genuflections and breast-beating does take a toll.
By almost a happenstance, I’m re-reading John Costello’s “The Pacific War: 1941-1945”. Mr Costello is both British and a BBC alumni so his first five or so (pre-actual war) chapters reveal the emotional impact that the colonies caused by not first surrendering to Mother England. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten.
On a more personal note, because he was a non-Japanese American, my father was interned from 1942-1946 in various camps in various American backwaters. That tedium was somewhat relieved by an all expense paid tour of the western Pacific including memorable stops at Saipan and Peleliu. Once day, I found the temerity to ask him how many Japs he had killed. His answer was “Enough.”
And enough is enough.
I’ve had THREE Japanese people tell me that they don’t understand why the US bombed Japan, that the US felt threatened by Japan and destroyed it as a rival, and that o9f course we’d gotten better since then.
Telling them that the US raped and plundered their way across the pacific and tried to wipe out the US pacific navy and or their fuel supply in a surprise attack because the US would not shut down naval bases in Alaska Led them to tell me that Koreans and Chinese and bigoted and movies are not to be believed.
One of them tried to tell me that the US keeps Japan down in terms of military power and I responded that in fact, since the fall of Saigon, the US has officially been recommending that Japan build a real carrier and sub force anticipating a resurgence of Russian and Chinese aggression or even Indian aggression in the region, and Japan has been insisting that they can’t because of their constitution, which they have had full authority and US support to change for a while now, and instead are building pairs of small escort carrier sized helicopter landing ships that they call helicopter destroyers to avoid conflict with their constitution.
I’m guessing that the Japanese education on the subject of World War the Deuce is pretty messed the hell up.
Telling them that the US raped and plundered their way across the pacific . . .
I think you got a typo there, dude.
But your point is well-taken. The Japanese were able to preserve a number of institutions which didn’t allow the sort of soul-searching which existed/exists in Germany.
Millions of lives were saved by dropping the two atomic bombs.
Full stop.
My personal favorite idiocy: “If only we had dropped a bomb on a demonstration site, they would have surrendered, and we could have avoided all that lost life.”
It makes me want to cock-punch them and scream in their faces, “We DID drop a bomb on a demonstration site, you imbecilic dolt! It was called Hiroshima. And guess what? THEY DIDN”T SURRENDER, YOU FUCKWITTED COMPLETE WASTE OF OXYGEN! WE HAD TO DROP THE SECOND BOMB TO FINALLY GET THEIR ATTENTION!” (Breathing heavily. Straightens clothes and smooths down hair.) “Now, let’s not hear any more about that particular bit of self-deluded tripe, shall we?”
David
Many people died in the blasts. However, there were other bombing campaigns during the war that resulted in a much higher loss of life. I’m sure firebombing Tokyo resulted in more dead than died at Hiroshima.
They wouldn’t stop.
They wouldn’t stop.
They wouldn’t stop.
They wouldn’t stop.
Japan was wholly consumed by a cult of personality. The entire population was four-square behind Japan’s imperial aggression.
They wouldn’t stop.
And I’m trying to understand why it’s less moral to kill 10,000 people with an atomic bomb than with conventional weapons.
The firebombing of Tokyo (and all those paper houses) meant that people burned alive and were aware of the fact that they were burning alive. Those vaporized by the a-bomb never felt a thing.
I would FAR rather be nuked than firebombed. Fallout, schmallout: surviving a wholesale bombing of a city isn’t something to look forward to, whether you survive the bomb but die later of radiation poisoning or of starvation/disease/gangrene.
All war is obscene. Even more obscene is the conceit that it can be sanitized, surgical, sporting, or fair.
The only moral way to wage war is to end it quickly and definitively, thus to minimize the moral toll it takes on a population, whether the it be the aggressor or the defender.
I wouldn’t call it a good thing. It was the least bad of a range of increasingly worse options.
I’m sure firebombing Tokyo resulted in more dead than died at Hiroshima.
look up Operation Meetinghouse
I’m sure firebombing Tokyo resulted in more dead than died at Hiroshima.
Hiroshima – 80,000, Nagasaki – 70,ooo, Tokyo raids – 300,000. At least those are the numbers I remember from when I studied this stuff many years ago.
So no, the firebomb raids killed twice as many people in one city alone.
David
Yeah? Whose gonna stop him?
Operation Meetinghouse 88,000 to 100,ooo killed
in one city in one night.
Ernst
“good” is a nice short word that makes it plain to the anti-American Left who seem to have issues with nuance that there was no other choice that didn’t involve slaughter on a massive scale.
I’m seething at how many “Oh Truman just dropped it to scare Russia, the pig” crap I’ve been seeing.
geoffb
agreed, one of Whittle’s best.
The retort to that is Stalin was so scared he knew about the bomb before Truman did.
Truman dropped it partly because the Russians were offering to “join” the invasion if the US didn’t pick up the pace and beat them to it.
“I think you got a typo there, dude.”
Yeah, I didn’t do a good job there.
I don’t think we could afford to waste our precious plutonium/uranium etc on a demonstration bomb.
Also, agree dead is dead.
Japan had 10 years of aggression against China before the US even got involved.
They had enough material to build 4 bombs in total. They blew one of them up to make sure it would work. They only had two others on August 6th, one of which they dropped on Hiroshima. After Nagasaki, they were fresh out, but another one became available a few days later.
A demonstration drop was pretty much out of the question.
Still, noisy history revisionists will be with us always.
ok ok ok we’ll surrender but you have to promise you gonna stop dropping these big huge ass bombs on us ok?
roger that, nipponesers! Now let’s wrap it up and put a bow on it.
Okey dokey yankee doodles. This is the start of a beautiful friendship!
we also got godzilla out of it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla
Greetings, “cranky-d”: ( @ August 6, 2015 at 3:27 pm )
I remember my father telling me “The only thing wrong with the a-bombings was we only had two.”
But then he was neither a revisionist nor an historian.
Funny newrouter, the wiki article says Godzilla represents the bomb but, my impression after seeing the original Godzilla film was that big G represented Imperial Japan and all its aggression.
Like japan with the A-bomb, Godzilla was only stopped by an ultimate weapon “the oxygen destroyer”, a device thought so dreadful, that the creator let himself die along with Godzilla.
“we also got godzilla out of it”
And Starblazers.
And, ultimately, tentacle pron.
And ultimately, tentacle pron.
Nope, that dates from around the end of the 18th century. See “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.”
David
The Japanese have always been pervy like that.
Maybe another reason why they deserved to get nuked?
Or, maybe not.
Tentacle porn represents the tyranny of the cis-hetero-paleo-patriarchal-carnivoro-individuo-fascist 99+% of humanity over the 0.0000001% who have their morals properly aligned.
Query: Are the last seven comments an example of “thread drift?”
I’ll be damned. Tentacle erotica.
Learn something new every day…
I don’t know if it’s drifted too much Sherm, kinda illustrates the vast gulf between the cultures and why an unmistakable message like an A bomb was necessary.
But then again
stupid html tags
It made my point better to cut that part out, Ernst.
I like to think of it as part of the normal fun we have around here. An exercise in group creativity.
i thought they were metaphoric tentacles
That’s what you get for thinking this is still 1992, your the mainstream media and Rush Limbaugh is just some fat guy on the radio.
The Shinto deities make the Aztec pantheon seems reasonable and well grounded. Seriously.
Izanagi and Izanami is a twisted freaky myth.
http://www.cracked.com/article_16962_bukkake-gods-japans-insane-creation-myths.html
Almost makes you wish the Coulter Doctrine was the cornerstone of our foreign policy.
I’m not sure if Anne is prescient or just lucky, as I used to consider that statement to be a tad crazy, but now I’m starting to come around to thinking she was right. Also possible, I’ve broken contact with reality.
With Japanese pron it is hard for us round eyes to see the difference in expression of a woman being raped and a women enjoying mutual pleasure. Having said that, the tentacle stuff is rape rape.
I hear that the right wing party in Japan uses the StarBlazers (Yamato) song in their campaigns.
What Coulter said is highly impolitic but it’s also what you’ve gotta do to win a war against an aggressive imperial ideology that’s consumed an entire nation.
The rubble had to bounce in Japan and Germany.
At Coyote Blog, moar context for the bomb.
They really, really, really wouldn’t stop.
Maybe there were other ways to achieve the same goal, but they all had their particular fallout, too.
The bomb was one of the “cleaner” ways to stop the war, and decades of Hollywood hysteria about EVILnuclearEVIL haven’t persuaded me to feel guilty about it.
There is an old mansion in my former neighborhood in D.C. called the Woodley Mansion. It now sits on the grounds of the Maret School, which acquired the property back in the late 20th century. The mansion was built by Francis Scott Key’s uncle, I think. It’s a pretty house. Anyway, there was when I lived around there a brass historical plaque outside the grounds next to the street, which explained that the house was owned by Henry Stimson. Stimson was Secretary of War for both FDR and then Harry Truman. The plaque said that it was in this house that Stimson informed the newly sworn in President Truman — Roosevelt having just died — of the existence of the Manhattan Project, and what that meant. I kinda liked that idea.